Foldit: A puzzle game where players fold proteins with the eventual aim of having players map the structures of unknown proteins and design new ones

Mapper: NASA gets players to analyze and tag photos from the bottoms of Pavilion Lake and Kelly Lake in British Columbia, studying lake features in hopes of helping find life on other planets

AgeGuess: Guess people’s age in a simple game, which investigates the differences between perceived age and chronological age as a potential aging biomarker.

Natural Products Discovery Group: They’ll send you a soil collection kit to return, and they will then screen the fungi in the sample for bioactivity against a variety of diseases to help in drug development.

Entomology (Insects)

School of Ants: The study of ants living in urban areas all around the US

The Great Sunflower Project: Focused on bee conservation, participants grow Lemon Queen sunflowers and make regular observations to count bees that visit them during the blooming season

Native Buzz: Study the nesting preferences and distribution of solitary bees and wasps throughout the world

Galaxy Zoo: Examine real images of galaxies, classify them, and help determine how they form.

Lowell Amateur Research Institute: There are a number of projects you can help out with, depending on what you’re interested in, your location, your time, and what software or equipment you have access to—most projects are aimed at serious amateur astronomers.

Moon Mappers: Analyse photos of the moon taken by the Linar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

GLOBE at Night: By comparing the sky above you to charts provided by the project, you can help measure the impact of light pollution on the visibility of stars.

Stardust@home: This is an online search for interstellar dust, using images of samples captured from the comet Wild 2 in 2004.

Target Asteroids: Help compile information about Near Earth Asteroids (must have access to a telescope).

Zooniverse: This is a collection of projects, mostly in astronomy (like looking at infrared images to find star-forming regions, studying wind patterns on Mars, and classifying images of the Moon’s surface) but some in climate, nature and archaeology too (like transcribing papyri and classifying bat calls). Click through to read about them.

Updated: 8 August 2017

Webpage maintained by the Active Learning Experiences in Resourceful Thinking (ALERT) classes of Richland School District Two, Columbia, South Carolina.Please direct queries to Mr. Kevin Durden.